Fame was never a burden for Bobby Thomson. Are you kidding? However you suspect that you would have reacted to hitting the most famous home run in baseball history, that’s precisely how Thomson reacted. He never grew weary of seeing the smiles on the faces of strangers. He lived with that moment for just shy of 59 years.

He reveled in every second, until the moment he passed away peacefully Monday night at age 86. Not in a boastful

way. Not in a selfish way. But exactly the way you would have lived these past 59 years. Exactly the way I would have lived them.

“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Bobby Thomson told me a few years ago, sitting in the living room of his modest house in Watchung, N.J. “It may have been the best thing that ever happened to anybody. I walked on a stage made in heaven.”

We throw the word “hero” around so often in sports, partly because we want athletes to be better than they are, to act better than they do. The sports pages are littered with too many tales of Francisco Rodriguez’s temper and Tiger Woods’ libido and Scott Boras’ greed, and sometimes it’s difficult to remember something.

Sometimes — less than we would like, maybe, but more than we admit — these athletes who perform heroic feats really are the equal of our devotion.

Bobby Thomson certainly was. On Oct. 3, 1951, he slammed a high fastball from Ralph Branca over the left-field wall at the Polo Grounds, a three-run shot that climaxed the greatest pennant race in baseball history and gave the Giants a 5-4 victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers.

That one swing of the bat — the Shot Heard ‘Round the World — yielded so many priceless baseball treasures. It capped a four-run, ninth-inning rally in the deciding game of the sport’s first three-game pennant playoff. It offered a lyrical finish to a remarkable comeback for the Giants, who stood 13 games behind the Dodgers on Aug. 11 of that year, with just 44 games left in the season.

As a bonus, it provided the single greatest snippet of play-by-play in the sport’s history, in any sport’s history, courtesy of Russ Hodges . . .

“There’s a long drive . . . it’s gonna be, I believe . . . The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands! The Giants win the pennant and they’re goin’ crazy! They’re goin’ crazy! Heeey-oh! ”

Yes, Thomson was glad this happened to him, because who wouldn’t be? Yet, at the same time, he felt terrible for Branca, knowing immediately that his fame would necessitate someone else’s infamy. He would perform a duet with Branca at a writer’s dinner that winter, attend hundreds of rubber-chicken dinners with him through the years.

“He never lorded it over me or anything,” Branca said yesterday. “Naturally, we never talked about it.”

Later, when it was revealed that the Giants had been stealing signs from the Dodgers most of that summer, when in fact it was intimated that Thomson hit his famous homer because he knew exactly what was coming, Thomson shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“I always said Ralph handled that moment better than any man possibly could have, certainly better than I would have, and if he wanted to be mad he had a right to be mad,” Thomson said, before adding with a laugh, “Of course, I’ve never heard him complain about how much money we’ve both made off that home run through the years, either.”

For the better part of 59 years, there would be thousands of autographs and thousands of retellings of his greatest moment on a baseball diamond, and Thomson never wearied of the task.

“He has a wonderful capacity for understanding that for these people, meeting him is a once-in-a-lifetime thrill,” Thomson’s daughter, Nancy Mitchell, told me once. “Then people meet him and they walk away thinking, ‘He’s just like me.’ And I think that gives him the biggest kick. Because my father knows how fortunate he’s been.”

“I’ve always looked at it this way,” Thomson once said. “What if I’d decided to take that pitch?”

Baseball, and its fans, will forever be grateful he decided to hack away instead.